Nitro Acquires doxIQ to Boost Document Analytics Expertise

Nitro, the document productivity company, announced it has acquired doxIQ, enhancing Nitro’s document analytics technology as the company begins transitioning from 10 years as the No. 1 replacement for Adobe Acrobat to a cloud-based provider of Smart Document services.

“There’s way more to document productivity than just creating, editing, converting and signing PDF documents,” said Nitro Founder and CEO Sam Chandler pictured above. “Analytics and insights are essential to unleash the value locked in business documents today.”

doxIQ was started last year in Palo Alto, CA. A graduate of Stanford’s StartX accelerator, the company’s technology has become a popular tool for converting marketing documents into intelligent web assets that increase conversion rates, collect behavioral data and send view alerts. The company won the early stage startup competition at GrowthBeat 2014, VentureBeat’s marketing tech conference.

“We saw a huge gap in the market for business document analytics akin to what Google provides for web traffic,” said doxIQ’s Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Michael Feng. “Being part of Nitro will allow us to fulfill our shared vision for using machine intelligence to make working with documents more pleasant and productive.”

As it integrates doxIQ’s technology, Nitro will transition doxIQ customers to its document sharing and e-signature product, Nitro Cloud. Feng will lead Nitro’s product management team. Max Cantor, doxIQ’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, will lead Nitro’s research and development team. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Chandler founded Nitro in 2005 in Melbourne, Australia to disrupt the PDF market. The company quickly established itself as the No.1 alternative to Acrobat for creating, editing and converting PDF documents, and has been making similar inroads in the e-signature market in recent years.

Nitro established its EMEA headquarters in Dublin in October 2013 with plans to hire 50 staff in its first two years of operation. Since then growth expectations have doubled with plans to hire over 100 staff by the end of 2016. The expansion in Europe has coincided with over 50% growth in EMEA customers since opening the Dublin office at Web Summit 2013.

Today, Nitro’s 200 employees help more than 500,000 businesses in 200 countries – including over half of the Fortune 500 – to improve document productivity and generates tens of millions in annual revenue.

“The problem is that PDF in many organizations has become a place where documents go to die,” said Chandler. “Document productivity and workflow is totally broken in the modern enterprise. We have to reinvent it so working with business documents is less painful and more intelligent. IDC has estimated that document challenges rob businesses of about one-fifth of their overall productivity. We’re on a mission to change that, and document analytics is central to our strategy. ”

To transform how the world works with documents, Nitro closed a $15 million financing round last November with leading US venture capital firm Battery Ventures, bringing total venture funding to $21.6 million.

Today, Nitro is focused on making documents smarter with analytics that provide insights, such as how long someone looks at certain elements, where they focus longest, and where they bail out.